Burkett, Paul. (1999) Marx And nature: A Red And Green perspective

his book reconstructs Marx’s approach to nature, society, and en-vironmental crisis.The focus on environmental issues needs littlejustification. There may still be disagreement about the threat tohuman survival posed by society’s environmental impacts, but no one candoubt that individual ecosystems and the global biosphere are both in-creasingly shaped by human production and consumption (Vitousek, etal., 1997). Given the quantitatively limited character of natural condi-tions, it follows that the quality of human-social development will in-evitably suffer if fundamentally new forms of social regulation are notapplied to the human appropriation of natural wealth (Schnaiberg andGould, 1994). In short, the environmental problem is not simply one ofhuman survival versus human extinction (which is not to deny the lat-ter possibility). It mainly involves alternative forms of co-evolution of so-ciety and nature, differing in terms of the human-developmentalpossibilities and restrictions they generate (Altvater, 1990, 26–8; Gowdy,1994a and 1994b).